Front End Web Developer Glossary (2013)

Hey troops, just starting out as a web designer / developer? We here at Design Pieces decided to scour the 2013 interwebs, searching for all the for all the key web design/development terms being bandied about. Oh, and then we wrote them down just for you!

So lets start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, with ‘Part 1: The Front End’. All the terms you might hear about front end web development. CSS Frameworks, Javascript MVCs, templating solutions, they are all here. Now keep in mind, no one uses everyone one of these technologies. No one. This is just to give you an idea of what’s out there. So don’t stress, and enjoy.

Front End CSS Frameworks

960gs – “The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels.”

Foundation – “Foundation is the most advanced front-end framework in the world. Foundation 3 is built with Sass, a powerful CSS preprocessor.”

HTML5 Boilerplate – “HTML5 Boilerplate helps you build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. Kick-start your project with the combined knowledge and effort of 100s of developers, all in one little package.”

CSSGrid 1140px – “The 1140 grid fits perfectly into a 1280 monitor. On smaller monitors it becomes fluid and adapts to the width of the browser.”

Underscore – “Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects.”

Javascript MVC

Backbone.JS – “Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.”

AngularJS – “AngularJS is what HTML would have been, had it been designed for building web-apps. Declarative templates with data-binding, MVW, MVVM, MVC, dependency injection and great testability story all implemented with pure client-side JavaScript!.”

App

Fonts

Typekit – “Add a line of code to your pages and choose from hundreds of web fonts. Simple, bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, and totally legal.”

FontSquirrel – “Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We’ve done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format.”

Conclusion

Well that about wraps it up for the front end. Remember to stay tuned for Part 2: Electric Boogaloo The Back End. And to all the diligent designers out there, who feel we missed something out, let us know in the comments below. My guess is its probably a Javascript MVC framework. The world really needs another one of those 😛

Okay guys, have fun!

Curious Craig McNamara

Special Thanks

A McNamara always pays his debts, so I’d just like to give a quick shout out to skilful @simultech on Twitter for helping the folks over here at Design Pieces with this article.